Right. So it’s weird to type, “Shhh: it’s Black Saturday,” and then start typing. [Um. Yeah. It’s now 10:44 p.m. Saturday night, and I just now realized that this opening sentence makes no sense if you don’t know—and, of course, no one but me could know—that the original title of this piece was, Shhh: it’s Black Saturday.] It’s like going, “Let us now have a moment of silence to commemorate the death of our great friend. So the other day I was walking by this newsstand, when …”
Wouldn’t that suck?
So if I could, just real quickly: I hate Good Friday. Every year on that day before I’m even awake I sink into this bottomless funk that basically leaves me lying on the couch all day watching TV, endlessly eating … well, yesterday it was Trader Joe’s Triple Ginger Snaps (mmmmm … delicious Trader Joe’s Triple Ginger Snaps while your soul breaks down because you can’t handle the savior of the universe being beaten, flayed alive, and nailed on a cross), wondering what the [bad word] is wrong with me, my life, and everything in the entire [bad wording] universe.
Ugh. The worst. And while it’s happening I never think that I’m feeling as I do because it’s “Good” (wtf is up with that?) Friday. I never go, “Oh, that’s right. How would I not be depressed today?” I always just think, “Screw it. Life is a pus-filled waste. I give up.” Then, the next day, I’m all “What the [bad word] was that? Oh, that’s right. It was ‘Good’ Friday.”
Last night I slept nine hours. It would be impossible for me to express how rare that is in my life. Pretty much every night of my life I sleep four hours; every once in a while, if for some reason I’m crazy exhausted, I’ll sleep for six. That happens maybe six times a year. For me to sleep for nine hours straight is like … King Kong knitting a pair of booties, or … I dunno, Frankenstein skipping rope. In my world, it’s as if a full moon suddenly shot across the sky and, billiards-ball style, knocked the sun right out of the sky.
And now here it is, Holy Saturday (a.k.a. “Black Saturday”). This is the day where the body of Jesus Christ is lying perfectly still in the dank darkness of his hillside tomb.
Today I’m experiencing deafness. It’s like I can’t hear. I can hear: my ears still work. But it’s as if time has so radically slowed that the space between all the sounds I hear extends for so long that essentially I’m living in silence. And the sounds I do hear are so muffled that it’s as if I’m hearing them through some sort of thick walls. It’s like I put in ear plugs and stepped into The Land That Time Forgot—or like my brain has shrunk into a tenth of its normal size, so that now to reach it all sounds have to travel through all this extra gooey fluid.
It’s not unpleasant, exactly. If I had to live like this, I guess … well, for one, I guess eventually fungus would start growing on me, because I can also barely move. The whole time I’ve been writing this I’ve been leaning my head to the right, and I haven’t moved it since. I know my neck must be killing me. But I can’t feel it.
Honestly, it’s like I’m absolutely numb everywhere but my fingers. My experience is that I’m a million miles away, yet somehow, from somewhere inside my head, am watching letters and words magically unscroll upon my screen.
I think this is the most out-of-body experience I’ve ever had. Except this happened to me before; I lived in this state while writing my book “Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang.”
Awful. Or awesome. I dunno. Whatever.
Anyway, just wanted to check in, send love, send … well, love. If you’re out there, and you’re reading this, and you’re Christian: God bless you. God bless you, and yours, and the people who are yours that you haven’t even met yet. God is with you, even now. Perhaps now more than ever.
If you’re not a Christian, God bless you, too! Today I cannot make that divide. (I never make that divide, actually. I don’t care if a person is or isn’t Christian. I care if they’re okay, of course. I care if I can help make them okay, if they’re not. Beyond that, I’m out.)
One love, yes? Yes.
Yes. Yes.
Yes.
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